Tommy and Co.

“Don’t chatter so much,” interrupted Mr. Clodd. “It’s not a pretty voice, yours. What I asked you was, do you intend to dispute it?”

“If you will kindly excuse us,” struck in Mrs. Gladman, addressing Mr. Clodd with an air of much politeness, “we shall just have time, if we go now, to catch our solicitor before he leaves his office.”

Mr. Gladman took up his hat from underneath his chair.

“One moment,” suggested Mr. Clodd. “I did influence him to make that will. If you don’t like it, there’s an end of it.”

“Of course,” commenced Mr. Gladman in a mollified tone.

“Sit down,” suggested Mr. Clodd. “Let’s try another one.” Mr. Clodd turned to the clerk. “The previous one, Mr. Wright, if you please; the one dated June the 10th.”

An equally short and simple document, it bequeathed three hundred pounds to Mr. William Clodd in acknowledgment of kindnesses received, the residue to the Royal Zoological Society of London, the deceased having been always interested in and fond of animals. The relatives, “Who have never shown me the slightest affection or given themselves the slightest trouble concerning me, and who have already received considerable sums out of my income,” being by name excluded.

“I may mention,” observed Mr. Clodd, no one else appearing inclined to break the silence, “that in suggesting the Royal Zoological Society to my poor old friend as a fitting object for his benevolence, I had in mind a very similar case that occurred five years ago. A bequest to them was disputed on the grounds that the testator was of unsound mind. They had to take their case to the House of Lords before they finally won it.”

“Anyhow,” remarked Mr. Gladman, licking his lips, which were dry, “you won’t get anything, Mr. Clodd – no, not even your three-hundred pounds, clever as you think yourself. My brother-in-law’s money will go to the lawyers.”

Then Mr. Pincer rose and spoke slowly and clearly. “If there must be a lunatic connected with our family, which I don’t see why there should be, it seems to me to be you, Nathaniel Gladman.”

Mr. Gladman stared back with open mouth. Mr. Pincer went on impressively.

“As for my poor old cousin Joe, he had his eccentricities, but that was all. I for one am prepared to swear that he was of sound mind in August last and quite capable of making his own will. It seems to me that the other thing, dated in June, is just waste paper.”

Mr. Pincer having delivered himself, sat down again. Mr. Gladman showed signs of returning language.

“Oh! what’s the use of quarrelling?” chirped in cheery Mrs. Gladman. “It’s five hundred pounds we never expected. Live and let live is what I always say.”

“It’s the damned artfulness of the thing,” said Mr. Gladman, still very white about the gills.

“Oh, you have a little something to thaw your face,” suggested his wife.

Mr. and Mrs. Gladman, on the strength of the five hundred pounds, went home in a cab. Mr. Pincer stayed behind and made a night of it with Mr. Clodd and Bonner’s clerk, at Clodd’s expense.

The residue worked out at eleven hundred and sixty-nine pounds and a few shillings. The capital of the new company, “established for the purpose of carrying on the business of newspaper publishers and distributors, printers, advertising agents, and any other trade and enterprise affiliated to the same,” was one thousand pounds in one pound shares, fully paid up; of which William Clodd, Esquire, was registered proprietor of four hundred and sixty-three; Peter Hope, M.A., of 16, Gough Square, of also four hundred and sixty-three; Miss Jane Hope, adopted daughter of said Peter Hope (her real name nobody, herself included, ever having known), and generally called Tommy, of three, paid for by herself after a battle royal with William Clodd; Mrs. Postwhistle, of Rolls Court, of ten, presented by the promoter; Mr. Pincer, of the House of Commons, also of ten (still owing for); Dr. Smith (né Schmidt) of fifty; James Douglas Alexander Calder McTear (otherwise the “Wee Laddie”), residing then in Mrs. Postwhistle’s first floor front, of one, paid for by poem published in the first number: “The Song of the Pen.”

Choosing a title for the paper cost much thought. Driven to despair, they called it Good Humour.

STORY THE THIRD – Grindley Junior drops into the Position of Publisher

Few are the ways of the West Central district that have changed less within the last half-century than Nevill’s Court, leading from Great New Street into Fetter Lane. Its north side still consists of the same quaint row of small low shops that stood there – doing perhaps a little brisker business – when George the Fourth was King; its southern side of the same three substantial houses each behind a strip of garden, pleasant by contrast with surrounding grimness, built long ago – some say before Queen Anne was dead.

Out of the largest of these, passing through the garden, then well cared for, came one sunny Sunday morning, some fifteen years before the commencement proper of this story, one Solomon Appleyard, pushing in front of him a perambulator. At the brick wall surmounted by wooden railings that divides the garden from the court, Solomon paused, hearing behind him the voice of Mrs. Appleyard speaking from the doorstep.

“If I don’t see you again until dinner-time, I’ll try and get on without you, understand. Don’t think of nothing but your pipe and forget the child. And be careful of the crossings.”

Mrs. Appleyard retired into the darkness. Solomon, steering the perambulator carefully, emerged from Nevill’s Court without accident. The quiet streets drew Solomon westward. A vacant seat beneath the shade overlooking the Long Water in Kensington Gardens invited to rest.

“Piper?” suggested a small boy to Solomon. “Sunday Times, ’Server?”

“My boy,” said Mr. Appleyard, speaking slowly, “when you’ve been mewed up with newspapers eighteen hours a day for six days a week, you can do without ’em for a morning. Take ’em away. I want to forget the smell of ’em.”

Solomon, having assured himself that the party in the perambulator was still breathing, crossed his legs and lit his pipe.

“Hezekiah!”

The exclamation had been wrung from Solomon Appleyard by the approach of a stout, short man clad in a remarkably ill-fitting broad-cloth suit.

“What, Sol, my boy?”

“It looked like you,” said Solomon. “And then I said to myself: ‘No; surely it can’t be Hezekiah; he’ll be at chapel.’”

“You run about,” said Hezekiah, addressing a youth of some four summers he had been leading by the hand. “Don’t you go out of my sight; and whatever you do, don’t you do injury to those new clothes of yours, or you’ll wish you’d never been put into them. The truth is,” continued Hezekiah to his friend, his sole surviving son and heir being out of earshot, “the morning tempted me. ’Tain’t often I get a bit of fresh air.”

“Doing well?”

“The business,” replied Hezekiah, “is going up by leaps and bounds – leaps and bounds. But, of course, all that means harder work for me. It’s from six in the morning till twelve o’clock at night.”

“There’s nothing I know of,” returned Solomon, who was something of a pessimist, “that’s given away free gratis for nothing except misfortune.”

“Keeping yourself up to the mark ain’t too easy,” continued Hezekiah; “and when it comes to other folks! play’s all they think of. Talk religion to them – why, they laugh at you! What the world’s coming to, I don’t know. How’s the printing business doing?”

“The printing business,” responded the other, removing his pipe and speaking somewhat sadly, “the printing business looks like being a big thing. Capital, of course, is what hampers me – or, rather, the want of it. But Janet, she’s careful; she don’t waste much, Janet don’t.”

“Now, with Anne,” replied Hezekiah, “it’s all the other way – pleasure, gaiety, a day at Rosherville or the Crystal Palace – anything to waste money.”

“Ah! she was always fond of her bit of fun,” remembered Solomon.

“Fun!” retorted Hezekiah. “I like a bit of fun myself. But not if you’ve got to pay for it. Where’s the fun in that?”

“What I ask myself sometimes,” said Solomon, looking straight in front of him, “is what do we do it for?”

“What do we do what for?”

“Work like blessed slaves, depriving ourselves of all enjoyments. What’s the sense of it? What – ”

A voice from the perambulator beside him broke the thread of Solomon Appleyard’s discourse. The sole surviving son of Hezekiah Grindley, seeking distraction and finding none, had crept back unperceived. A perambulator! A thing his experience told him out of which excitement in some form or another could generally be obtained. You worried it and took your chance. Either it howled, in which case you had to run for your life, followed – and, unfortunately, overtaken nine times out of ten – by a whirlwind of vengeance; or it gurgled: in which case the heavens smiled and halos descended on your head. In either event you escaped the deadly ennui that is the result of continuous virtue. Master Grindley, his star having pointed out to him a peacock’s feather lying on the ground, had, with one eye upon his unobservant parent, removed the complicated coverings sheltering Miss Helvetia Appleyard from the world, and anticipating by a quarter of a century the prime enjoyment of British youth, had set to work to tickle that lady on the nose. Miss Helvetia Appleyard awakened, did precisely what the tickled British maiden of to-day may be relied upon to do under corresponding circumstances: she first of all took swift and comprehensive survey of the male thing behind the feather. Had he been displeasing in her eyes, she would, one may rely upon it, have anteceded the behaviour in similar case of her descendant of to-day – that is to say, have expressed resentment in no uncertain terms. Master Nathaniel Grindley proving, however, to her taste, that which might have been considered impertinence became accepted as a fit and proper form of introduction. Miss Appleyard smiled graciously – nay, further, intimated desire for more.

“That your only one?” asked the paternal Grindley.

“She’s the only one,” replied Solomon, speaking in tones less pessimistic.

Miss Appleyard had with the help of Grindley junior wriggled herself into a sitting posture. Grindley junior continued his attentions, the lady indicating by signs the various points at which she was most susceptible.

“Pretty picture they make together, eh?” suggested Hezekiah in a whisper to his friend.

“Never saw her take to anyone like that before,” returned Solomon, likewise in a whisper.

A neighbouring church clock chimed twelve. Solomon Appleyard, knocking the ashes from his pipe, arose.